Spending on what you need

A television commentator just now, in a shocked tone, bemoaning the economy - "The numbers right now show that people are only spending on what they need. That is not a recipe for prosperity."

Yes, of course. Much better to have people spending borrowed money on frivolous luxuries. Excellent.

There's a lot of bias against recipes (for cooking) among food people - "I don't need a recipe", they say.  "I just cook what seems good".  Sometimes this comes off as a little self righteous.  Or actually a lot self righteous. 

All that it may be, but I agree with the anti-recipe sentiment anyway.  But sometimes recipes are so tempting that I make them anyway, and such is the case for the below, Tom Colicchio's eggplant napeoleon, from Think Like a Chef.  There's nothing s

pecial here - just fried eggplant sandwiching eggplant "caviar" (i.e., baked eggplant, roasted red pepper, lemon, parsley, roasted garlic), topped with a little avocado and a lemon vinaigrette dressing, but it is very very good.

The eggplant can be fried in advance and warmed in a 350 F oven, I found.  

Menti

I've found that no matter how much one pines for certain foods, some things are too much of a pain to almost ever make.  Mente, or Menti, are one of those things - eraser sized dumplings made of a yeastless dough of flour, olive oil and water, and tiny balls of cayenne spiced lamb, all squeezed into a Star Wars-y canoe shape.  That is, imagine making ravioli, but instead of six per person, having to make thirty.  But it also turns out that it's easier to make Mente while watching football, and with Wild Card Weekend upon us, I decided to give it a go.  Iphone pics are below.  

In case you have the inclination, instructions follows:

1. Make dough with some flour, a little olive oil, some salt, and enough water to make a pliable mass.  It doesn't need much kneading - just until all mixed.  Let rest for 1 hour. 

2. While resting, mix some cayenne (to taste) and salt (again, to taste) into ground lamb.  Roll between your fingers into little balls - as I note above, about the size of erasers on a pencil.  Allow 30 per person. 

3. Roll out the dough paper thin.  It is very important that the dough is extremely, extremely thin.  You should be able to read a newspaper through it with little difficulty.

4. Cut the dough into small squares, about an inch long and half an inch wide.

5. Place a meat ball in the middle of each dough, and push the sides together to form the shape in the pictures.  The meat should stick out of the middle, as if the meat were a middle-aged vacationer sitting in a dough-canoe.

6. Place a small piece of butter/solid lipid of your choice on top of each dumpling. 

7. Bake at 375 F until the dough is quite crisp, like a cracker.

8. Add hot chicken broth to pan in which dumplings were made.  The crispy dumplings will soak up the broth and partially soften. 

9. Serve (finally!) with garlicky yogurt and mint and Syrian dried peppers (fine, fine, paprika will do) and sumac. 

Bar Boulud

We stopped by Bar Boulud last night on the way to see The Wrestler (very good, though hard to watch).  Consistent with all the reviews, I could see no reason to order any of the main courses.  But we assembled a meal from a masterful pate of chicken liver and pork and cognac, a terrine of lamb and sweet potatoes, some fries, and a plate of almost pickled coriander carrots.  This is the new wave of dining in New York - snacks, and plates, and communal tables.  I like it.

Simple Syrup, or adventures with knefe

On a recent episode of Mike Colamecco's Food Show on public television, Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 was asked to explain the genesis of modern "scientific" cooking, or what others have called molecular gastronomy.  His point was telling: although he was a perfectly good traditional chef, he became frustrated by the somewhat stilted explanations he received to his questions about technique, which didn't go much further than assurances that one roasted a chicken in this or that way because it worked.  With the help of Harold McGee and others, Dufresne and Achatz and the Spanish chefs have exposed many of the answers to Dufresne's questions, and manipulated those traditional methods of cookery to produce new foods.  Funnily enough, what Dufresne didn't recognize in the clip I saw is that his inquisitive methods are now simply being aped, precisely the same way the traditional chef's methods have been aped for centuries.  That is, unless you think that the thousands of chefs making ice cream with liquid nitrogen know anything more than some vague pap about smaller ice crystals. 

In any case, I'm not a professional chef, but something that Dufresne said in the interview with respect to bistro owners resonated with me.  As he put it, sure, it's nice to make fancy molecular food, but the bistro owner wanting to make the same perfect fries every time has an equivalent interest in scientific cooking.  It occurs to me that on a very small scale, so does the home cook. 

An example: Knefe bil jows is a dessert consisting of two layers of shredded phyllo (aka, kataifi) sandwiching a layer of walnuts, sugar, and cinnamon, all doused while hot with cool syrup.  The nightmare scenario for any home cook is when your sugar syrup crystalizes, leaving you with grainy, unpleasant, knefe with the mouth feel of fudge gone wrong.  For most Armenian/Lebanese/Syrian cooks, crystallization is a calamity with about the predictability of a flood or tornado, but with less warning.  Suddenly, apparently from nowhere, your sugar seizes up, whether in the pan, in the jar while cooling, or even when thrown onto the pastry.  The dessert everyone has been looking forward to is ruined.  In the meantime, the traditional prophylactics are about as logical at first glance as the tiger's paw a tribal witch doctor might prescribe.  Lemon, cream of tartar, or honey, in varying amounts, thrown into the syrup while stirring, or not stirring, or while cooling.   These methods work, just like the traditional method for roasting chicken usually works, but capriciously, and with no guarantees.

And here, of course, is the point.  Science can explain how to keep your sugar syrup from crystallizing, and in fact the whole process is very well known and entirely commonplace.  And yet, generations of middle eastern cooks are left making knefe in terror, or, like some of my family, not making knefe at all, because the whole thing might be carried off at a moment's notice by whatever the cooking equivalent of gremlins might be.  I do not except myself.  While I've read McGee's chapter on sugar syrups twice now, I'm still worried the thing might crystallize the second I throw it onto the phyllo.  

Maybe I'll figure it out with one more read. 

PS: Science tells us that honey, cream of tartar and lemon work because they impede crystallization by inverting the sucrose, and allowing the cook more time to "cool the syrup into a clear candy".  What I don't understand entirely is whether I read McGee correctly to say that crystals can form in sugar syrup at any temperature above 212 F, or whether my failed syrups have all failed because I let them go above 235 F into the fudgey stage.  

 

Sometimes simple food is tiring, though

Or so I thought after finishing the kofte and the knefe bil jows I'm taking to our friends' house for New Year's Eve, and sinking into the couch and drifting asleep (pictures, descriptions, later).    And that's even leaving aside my subsequent dream involving putting some chocolate powder on my Starbucks cappuccino, realizing the chocolate wasn't labelled, and deciding that the perpetrator was a murderer who had put cyanide in the bottle, but was too scrupulous to mislabel the chocolate/poison as chocolate.  

This, of course, is the kind of murderer I would be, and the world is fortunate just for the sake of avoiding further ennui that I am so docile. 

Sleepiness

Stuart Buck notes, correctly, how devastating the loss of sleep is to all sorts of things.  During my own annus horribilis (October 2006 - December 2007) I couldn't have slept more than 5 hours average per night during any week in that period (except for the 5 days off I took in August, 2007), divided between rare full nights of sleep and all-night firedrills.   Putting entirely aside the fact that my efficacy in my job dropped off one fairly shallow cliff at about midnight and another, much steeper, cliff at 3 or 4 am (to near uselessness), that nightmarish period had a lasting effect on my already prone-to-fat metabolism, which I haven't even come close to fighting off now a full year later.   I don't really begrudge the fact that society has organized itself in such a way that these hours are thought to be laudable for a young professional, but there is no doubt that my constitution, at least, was no match for them. 

Good food doesn't have to be complicated, volume 7 Billion

I'm working from home today, and decided to have some a light snack of fish for lunch.  I mixed some ras al hanout with mayonnaise, and spread it on my plate.  Then I cut up American farm raised tilapia (according to what I can figure out, this is good, cheap, fish from both a sustainability and not eating fish laced with a Valdez worth of chemicals perspective), powdered the fish slightly with a mixture of flour, salt and smoked paprika, and fried in extra virgin olive oil.   I dotted each fillet with fleur de sel and some balsamic. 

PS: You don't need ras al hanout or fleur de sel.  Plain mayo is fine,

 as is mayo with almost any spice you like.  An appropriate substitute for fleur de sel, amazingly enough, is salt.  And no complaints about how olive oil is expensive either.  The small bottle I used on this cost 3 dollars. You don't need balsamic. A lemon works as well. 

Train

I am on a train to Washington to celebrate Christmas with my family, and then will return to New York in the morning to be with my fiancee's family. To all those who celebrate Christmas, merry Christmas!

Momofuku Milk Bar

Last night was one of these deeply New York food nights, with the usual caveat that everything didn't go right. I left my firm at about 6:00 for Russ & Daughters to get some Gaspe Nova, and unfortunately got out at Broadway-Lafayette Street instead of Lower East Side station, and thus arrived at Russ precisely when they were locking up. I made the shape of smoked salmon with my hands through the window, but no luck. Annoyed, I walked ten blocks up first avenue to Momofuku Noodle Bar, on the theory that I might get a bite to eat, and then visit the new Milk Bar for a dessert to take home. The two problems with that plan were that Noodle Bar was packed, and Milk Bar is behind Ssam Bar (which is an avenue and two blocks away on 13th and Second), not Noodle Bar. So I walked to Ssam bar and went into the bakery to get one of the deep fried egg pork buns. Of course, they stop serving savories at 5:00 pm. Instead, I had a pistachio cake as dinner, wolfing it down at the standing table in the bakery itself, and took a banana cake home to share. Then I walked across to 20th and between 5th and Park, where I picked up 5 bottles of wine (4 Becco Rosso, and a German Sylvaner) at Moore Brothers for Christmas, before grabbing the train home. Exhausted, obviously.

Now to substance. Before anything else, let me make clear that I have the same complaint about Milk Bar as everyone else. The service is truly appalling. There were only three of us in line, and my cake took about 12 minutes to slice. It's not even an organizational matter, which might be excusable. Rather, the particular guy charged with slicing my cake was so excruciatingly slow that I felt like jumping over the counter and doing it myself, and despite the glacial speed, he still gave me the wrong order.

As for the cake, the Banana Cake is delicious, though nothing I would pine to order again. The combination of fudge, the nutella-like Hazelnut crunch and the banana cake and cream layers is terrific and pretty unexpected. I've got less love for the pistachio cake, despite the masterful lemon curd. The real point here is that at Milk Bar, Chang fails at doing what he usually does, which is tweaking classics to make them more "delicious", as he constantly appears to repeat. Traditional French or German patisserie is just better than this hopped up American stuff, no matter how many calories Chang packs into each 14 foot high slab, but the bakery is run without any knowledge of that underlying fact. As I heard one employee explain to a customer asking about Momofuku's italian stick bread, "it's like a baguette, but more flavorful".

No, not really.

A question

An interesting hypothesis that occurred to me last night as I penguined my fiancee delicately back to her house after dinner last night, doing my best not to fall on the sheets of ice people hadn't shoveled from their pavements - does the increasing number of renters in Astoria have something to do with the lack of shoveling?

Questions: Are there increasing numbers of renters? And are they doing less shoveling? My fiancee, who was literally raised on the same street she lives on now, says "yes" to both.

A report on Kofte

For a snack last night, I made what we at my home would call kofte, what other calls kibbe, and what I've seen rendered in some books as "stuffed footballs". All of these things are the same, which is to say a football shaped shell of bulghur wheat, onion and ground meat of some sort, stuffed with more ground meat, spices, onions and nuts, and then fried to a golden brown. Though they turned out fine, they could have been much better. My notes follow:

1. My grandmother used to make these by pounding the meat, bulghur and onion by hand until it was a paste thick enough to make a shell. A food processor works great.

2. 1/2 cup of burghul for a half pound of meat does not make a proper shell in terms of flavor and color. I will up this to a full cup per half pound next time.

3. Seasoning, seasoning, seasoning. Kofte needs salt. Lots of salt. And other spices too (Query allspice, cinammon, clove?).

4. Do not be afraid of the deep fryer. Low temperatures do nothing for kofte.

Beacon

I've long meant to go to Beacon, mostly because the restaurant watching community in New York has a lot of respect for Waldy Malouf's food oriented, not over crowded, pleaser of a restaurant.  Part of the magic is the Thursday burger bar, and part of it is Malouf's kitchen counter Thursday night bacchanalian 12 course menu for a mere $98, but most of it is the fact that Beacon is a comfortable, happy restaurant churning out excellent food.  I loved my comfortable leather seat, I loved the spacious dining room overlooking the woodburning kitchen, and I especially loved my simple roast chicken and strong, bracing martini.  My fiancee's lobster salad was equally good, a full half of lobster set aside a number of roasted shrimp and delicate leaves. 

As we left, a tourist couple outside was looking at the menu and was wondering aloud if Beacon had only a prix fixe.  I assured them that there was a full menu inside.  They looked relieved, and then asked how much things cost.  "$27-41 for main courses, except for the burger", I said.  They winced, understandably, and then started walking along 56th street for what was likely to be a much inferior meal elsewhere.  Most places, I wouldn't have minded.  With Beacon, I wish I could have convinced them to go inside.

Maya

I awoke to a figurative fire drill at 4 am (ah, the joy of international law), so here I am at 5:45, things still smoldering.  It's as good an opportunity as any to blog about Maya, a haute mexican restaurant we ended up in Sunday night when I relied too much on the idea that everything is always open in New York, and thus left my fiancee and myself standing disconsolate outside a very closed Sushi Seki.  I was not in a good mood. 

I'm happy to report that the main courses at Maya, although a little dated (hey look, what we ate is mentioned in this old review from Ruth Reichl, who hasn't been the reviewer for the New York Times since 1999, I think) were terrific.  I have nothing but good things to say about my dark, mysteriously spicy, chicken mole, and her adobe chicken with warm pico de gallo was actually very tasty and just lively enough.   Of course, they could have been served at any time from 1984 to today without nary a change, but one doesn't always need innovation, even from restaurants who claim to be "modern".  

Dessert, however, plunged me back into despondency.  A mushy, cold tart, filled with tasteless almond (supposedly) cream, lashed with blueberry treacle? (Blueberries?  now?).  Just awful, inexcusable, glop. 

Maybe my judgment of the dessert is a little stilted, I think, because I was and still am in such an awful funk (see first sentence).  But then I think back to that pathetic, pale flour color circle, and the bland cream that wasn't even encompassed in the crust, almost sneaking shamefacedly away from a pie no one would want to hang around with.  Nope.  If anything, the fact that the mole was delicious probably made me better disposed to that awful dessert than I would have been.  It was bad. 

And yes, as the New York Times says, Maya is expensive.  Unlike many places, I cannot tell you why. 

Friday, thank god

I've had a terrible, wretched week at work, which was not made any better (surprisingly) by the knowledge that my analagous weeks in 2006/2007 were much, much worse. That is to say that I'd be equally stressed out, but also wouldn't sleep more than 2 hours a night. At least I've slept this week, I think to myself.



But it doesn't make it any better.

The chef recommends . . .

The topic over at Tom Sietsema's food chat is whether it's ok to ask a chef to change his or her food for you. My dashed off post is below:

Like other people, I think it depends. At an "important" restaurant, I would never change anything unless it literally makes me sick. I mean, what is the point of Minibar or Citronelle or Alinea or Per Se or French Laundry if you're going to micro-manage these people? The food is what it is. At a lesser place without grandiose aspirations, I think it's ok to change things (though I personally don't do it). No one is going to make a face if you want your Mcdonald's cheeseburger without ketchup. It's a distinction between gastronomy, I guess, and eating. The closer you get to the former, and the further from the latter, the less acceptable it is to monkey with the food.

Thinking more about it, I've come up with this informal taxonomy of the eating v. gastronomy spectrum. The dashed line roughly divides up where I think it's no longer ok to ask for substantial changes in the food. For reference, my views on Prune are here and Babbo here.

Corruption

The really pathetic thing about the extraordinary allegations of deep corruption against the Governor of Illinois, is that Governor Blagojevich was allegedly trying to sell the golden goose of the Senate seat at his disposal for a job paying a mere $250,000 - $300,000. Hasn't he heard of consulting companies, or lobbyists, or any one of fifty thousand places that might pay him such a non-princely sum (non-princely for a Governor, I mean) without trying to sell a Senate seat?

Butternut Squash custard and failed sous vide-y pork tenderloin

I'm not sure what to call this other than a custard, but in any case it is great with pork tenderloin. Simply roast an entire butternut squash in a 350 degree oven for about an hour and a half. Scoop out the flesh, and mix with two eggs, grated cheese, salt, pepper and mascarpone cheese (or, full fat greek yogurt). Pour into a pan, preferably a springform, and bake for about 45 minutes at 350 degrees. Let cool a little (I ate it warm) and cut into pie slices before topping with grated ricotta salatta.

I wrapped the pork tenderloin into a tight sausage in plastic wrap, and tried to poach gently in the plastic, as set forth in the Alinea cookbook. I loved the result of wrapping the pork in the plastic in terms of getting a manageable shape out of a difficult cut to cook evenly, but the poaching didn't work especially. Instead, I pan roasted in butter, basting with butter constantly. It tasted great.

Birbiglia

I've liked Mike Birbiglia ever since I saw him with Jeremy a couple of years ago,  and I liked very much his performance of Sleepwalk with Me.  I associate myself completely with Jeremy's review of an earlier version of the show, except that Birbiglia didn't lose us when he admitted the bad thing (I assume we're both thinking about the same semi-fast food related item), and I thought that the last joke would be that his dad also saw the jackal. 

Anyway, highly recommended.  Even for $30. 

What I'm dreaming about cooking tomorrow before I leave for dinner

Butternut squash custard sprinkled with pancetta and cheese

Small fishes, filleted,  fried in extra virgin olive oil sitting on a mild curry sauce.